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Craige: Making non-humans more human

Yesterday as I took a sweater out of a drawer, Cosmo asked me, “That’s clothes?”

Cosmo, my African grey parrot, had generalized from my telling her over the years that “Cosmo has feathers. Cosmo is a birdy. Mary has fur. Mary is a doggy. Betty Jean has clothes.”

So Cosmo really knew what “clothes” meant, whether they were on me or in a drawer.

Cosmo is a smart bird.

In this column I’ve used stories about Cosmo to explore the relationships we humans have developed with birds and other non-human animals. I employ the term “non-human animals” to remind us that we’re all animals despite obvious differences between ourselves and everybody else who makes a living on Earth.

My friend Mark Farmer sent me an NPR report about some non-human animals being made less non-human. The report was titled “To Make Mice Smarter, Add a Few Human Brain Cells.” I’ll try to summarize it.

All brains have two kinds of cells: neurons, which emit electrical impulses, and glia, which surround and support the neurons. For more than a century, scientists have focused primarily on neurons, to the neglect of the abundant glia. However, neuroscientists have recently discovered that certain glial cells called astrocytes coordinate groups of neurons by chemical signals.

Astrocytes regulate the flow of information through the brain. Everybody’s neurons look alike, but our astrocytes don’t. Humans’ astrocytes are bigger — that is, they have more extensions — than everybody else’s.

Steve Goldman of the University of Rochester wondered whether it’s our astrocytes that make us humans smarter than non-human animals. So he and Maiken Medergaard injected some human astrocytes into the brains of newborn mice. The modified mice, who still looked and acted mousy, turned out to be smarter than the unmodified mice with mouse astrocytes. They learned faster on maze tests and made fewer mistakes.

Wow. Should we still classify the human-astrocyte mice as “non-human”?

What if the really smart mice decide they don’t much like their caregivers, escape their lab, fall in love and have sexual relations without protection? Let’s imagine that they pass on their acquired intellectual prowess to their offspring and populate the world with intellectual human-astrocyte mice. Uh oh.

What if animal-friendly neuroterrorists sneak into our barns and inject human astrocytes into the brains of newborn calves? When those calves grow up, will they decide they don’t much like their caregivers, escape their farm and populate the world with really smart, discontented, leftist cattle who will overthrow our factory farm industry? Under the leadership of Cow Marx, they will moo, “Cattle of the world, unite!”

What if neuroterrorists sneak into our hospital nurseries and inject bovine astrocytes into human babies?

Humans have been tinkering with species since the agricultural revolution, which started some 12,000 years ago. We’ve made dogs out of wolves. We’ve made pigs out of wild boar. We’ve made fancy pigeons. (Google “Fancy Pigeon Gallery” to see a lot of very fancy pigeons locked up in tiny cages. I’m sure that if newly hatched fancy pigeons got human astrocytes they’d be outta there.)

We humans have done all this by artificial selection — by deciding who mates with whom according to the traits we desire in the offspring. Darwin got his explanation for the origin of species from the principles of artificial selection. He was a pigeon fancier.

Only recently have scientists modified species by means other than selection. Genetic engineers have created hybrids we call GMOs, genetically modified organisms. In the future will astrocyte engineers make AMAs, astrocytically modified animals?

Cosmo is not a hybrid. African grey parrots evolved naturally, over millennia. I don’t want curious researchers to inject human astrocytes into African greys to see what they’d do if they were smarter. The pet greys would probably be even more rebellious than they are now.

Last night Cosmo was quite rebellious.

I was getting dressed to go out when I noticed Cosmo enter the cabinet under the bathroom sink. “That’s OK,” I thought to myself. Cosmo can’t damage anything there, and she can’t get hurt.

A little later I opened the little drawer attached to the counter where I’d hidden my lipsticks from her. OMG! “Iced Amethyst,” “Blue Rose,” “Iceblue Pink,” “Sea Fleur,” and “Gumdrop” had all disappeared! The drawer was empty. Cosmo had accessed it from beneath the sink. I found the lipsticks in the waste basket where she’d dropped them, each lipstick open, each with deep beak marks.

“Cosmo!” I exclaimed.

“Cosmoooooo!” She mocked me. I parked her on the towel rack while I struggled to repair “Iced Amethyst.” She immediately tossed the towel onto the floor.

“Cosmo!” I exclaimed again.

“Cosmoooooo!” She mocked me again.

What would she do or say if she had human astrocytes in her brain?

• Betty Jean Craige is professor emerita of comparative literature at the University of Georgia and the author of many books, including “Conversations with Cosmo: At Home with an African Grey Parrot” (2010). Her email address is bettyjean@cosmotalks.com. Cosmo’s website address is www.cosmotalks.com.

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